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<title>sleep don't visit, so I choke on sun by thewinterapostate</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27987156">sleep don't visit, so I choke on sun</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewinterapostate/pseuds/thewinterapostate'>thewinterapostate</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Boys (TV 2019)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 17:41:56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,041</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27987156</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewinterapostate/pseuds/thewinterapostate</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn’t that Frenchie was bored.</p><p>--------------</p><p>a brief travelogue, post season 2</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>The Female | Kimiko Miyashiro &amp; The Frenchman</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>sleep don't visit, so I choke on sun</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It wasn’t that Frenchie was bored.</p><p>The first thing that he and Kimiko did when they were free men with clean names (or no name in Kimiko’s case, and upwards of fifteen names in his) was go to Disneyland.</p><p>They bought felt ear headbands and watched the Magic Happens parade. Kimiko tried churros for the first time. He dropped acid before they rode It’s A Small World. It was a lovely vacation.</p><p>From there they went to Hawaii and spent three weeks on a beach doing nothing in particular other than eating shave ice and malasadas and collecting conch shells. They had to buy a second suitcase for the shells because they couldn’t bring themselves to leave any behind.</p><p>They went to France. Ostensibly it was so that they could watch Marseilles play Paris Saint Germain in the football Ligue 1. They did not stay long enough in France to watch the match. It only took three days past their arrival at Charles de Gaul that Kimiko made the executive decision that it was time for them to move on. Frenchie had made a token protest but let her lead him by the hand through the departures gate as they left. He’d been jumping at shadows and dosing himself with benzos and flinching away from older men that brushed past them on the Metro since they arrived.</p><p>They went to Madrid and watched El Clasico instead.    </p><p>They visited Milan, Rio de Janeiro, London, Sarajevo. Frenchie briefly brought up the concept of them travelling to Japan, but quickly retracted the idea when Kimiko’s grip on his hand became hard enough to make his fragile finger bones creak.</p><p>So it wasn’t that Frenchie was bored. They were having a wonderful time. He wasn’t bored.</p><p>It was just…</p><p>His mind moved too quickly. It always had done. It was why he liked drugs. They filled the empty space, the yawning cavern that opened when he didn’t have something to focus on. A puzzle to unravel. Without a focus, or influence of narcotics, then his mind tended to wander, and that wasn’t something that anyone wanted.</p><p>It only led to bad things. Experience told him that.</p><p>Monsieur Charcutier called seven months after they had last parted. He called one of their sixteen burner phones while they were in Oslo, hoping to see the Northern Lights. He called and said that there was work to be done.</p><p>He didn’t ask. He never asked, mostly because whether Frenchie would follow him was never in question. Monsieur Charcutier assumed that the same was the case for Kimiko now. It wasn’t, but she did not protest the summons. Perhaps she was bored too. Or maybe she, like Frenchie, just realised that it was time to get back to work. They were good at what they did, the two of them, in a way that would not translate to a simple life. It would either be the kind of work that Monsieur Charcutier could provide, or an endless vacation. And while Frenchie could certainly fund that, the appeal wore off after a while.</p><p>Two days later they were back in New York. Not squatting under a pawn shop anymore; Frenchie had taken the initiative and rented a loft in Hell’s Kitchen for Kimiko and himself, correctly presuming that Monsieur Charcutier would not have made arrangements. New York did not seem quite so dismal a place now that they were not America’s Most Wanted, and the hubbub of noise from the open windows of their apartment on an evening was a welcome change from the silence of Oslo.</p><p>They met with their friends and Madame Mallory in the back room of a dive bar in Harlem. MM seemed calmer, his anxieties and impulses soothed by the time that he had spent reconnecting with his family. Hughie seemed older, but in a good way; Petit Hughie no more, he held himself taller and didn’t cower when the attention was focused on him. Butcher seemed...exactly the same, and Frenchie couldn’t work out whether that was good or bad. Madame Mallory outlined the latest act of depravity from Vought to them. It was a headfuck that not even a half dozen Boulevardiers and a prodigiously strong blunt did not go any way towards explaining. And yet, here they were</p><p>Which was exactly how Frenchie found himself in Columbus Circle with a pair of enormously large sunglasses on, an AR-15 in a duffel bag at his feet, and a prototype power blocker bracelet burning a hole in his pocket, waiting for <em> something </em>to happen.</p><p>Madame Mallory had been vague, in a way entirely undeliberate. One of her pocket supes, a precognitive, had indicated to her that something of great importance was due to happen in Columbus Circle at precisely one fifty two in the afternoon of January the Twentieth in Twenty Twenty One. She had no idea what it was that was supposed to happen, just that it required her best people.</p><p>Unfortunately, they were busy, so Butcher and his Boys would have to do it.</p><p>Hughie was sitting on a bench within their eye line, flicking nervously through a copy of the New York Times. MM stood to the side, having purchased a pretzel, chatting amiably to the vendor. Butcher, having drawn the short straw, was dressed as a city sweeper and was emptying one of the trash cans at the other side of the square.</p><p>Frenchie and Kimiko were sitting on the edge of a fountain, tearing slices of stale bread into pieces and tossing it to the ducks that had made their home there, while their eyes surveyed the square for anything out of the ordinary from behind dark glasses. After a few minutes, Kimiko made a gesture with her hands that would not make sense to anyone else in the vicinity, even if they spoke ASL.</p><p><b> <em>What are we even looking for?</em> </b> </p><p>Frenchie shrugged, lighting a cigarette and sticking it between his lips.</p><p>“I don’t know mon coeur. But I’m sure we will when it happens.” he smiled at her and tried to tempt one of the ducklings closer with a particularly delectable looking piece of three day old brioche “It is good to be back to work though, no?”</p>
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